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44. June the Maiden
Our intrepid heroes are looking into a chamber containing a hydra - half its heads asleep, the others casually chewing at the corpse of a long-dead person - and June the Maiden humming and combing her hair. They attack! ** Wilfred succeeds in banishing the hydra and then maintains his concentration on the spell for the remainder of the fight. ** Pyt becomes a giant crab. ** Clwyd is making use of the pieces of shadow she still holds to be very stealthy. ** Aerendyl moves away from the pack to spread June's attention around the room. ** Cormorant rushes to take June on up close. ** With her lair action, June forces strong currents through the arena, sending half the group tumbling through the water and crashing into the rocks and walls about the place. ** On later lair actions, June causes thick clouds of volcanic ash spew up to obscure various parts of the room, or she opens volcanic vents that create columns of scalding steam on top of some of the attacking party members. ** As she takes damage, June's half-snake-half-humanoid form cracks and splinters as if she were made of porcelain. ** With the hydra banished, the party were mostly able to focus fire on June, with the occasional complication from a lair action or her successfully casting hold person on Cormorant. ** Eventually, crab-Pyt grabbed hold of her sea serpent tail and smashed her into some rocks, shattering her and sending up a huge cloud of obscuring steam. * With June 'defeated', the party ready themselves for Wilfred to bring the hydra back and them to unload on it. But then she walks out of the steam, no longer half-snakey; just lovely and humanoid and naked and arrogant. ** Being close to her humanoid form risks beguiling one's mind. Most of the party are able to resist this effect, but Clwyd finds herself Charmed by June until Aerendyl is eventually able to dispel the effect. ** Wilfred reveals his hand early, counterspelling one of June's attempts at casting. This gives the party more time to move in for the kill, despite obscuring clouds of ash, forceful currents grinding them against stone and rock, and gouts of steam burning them even as they were underwater. ** Cormorant gets up in June's grill and unloads five devastating attacks in quick succession. ** Crab-Pyt is again able to grab her again. * And with that, all looked lost for June. She betrayed some panic on her expression, but then she saw a path through which she could escape: she surrounded Wilfred with obscuring ash and then used her final fourth-level spell slot to dimension door out of crab-Pyt's crushing claw and away. ** Cormorant and Pyt scramble towards a sealed door in the chamber, thinking June would have sequestered herself in her room. ** Aerendyl casts locate creature on June, revealing her to be near 500 feet away from the party, somewhere back within the coral-lined lava tubes they had just worked their way through. ** Wilfred takes Clwyd's hand and the pair of them stand next to Aerendyl. The gnome has the elf point in the exact direction of June the Maiden and then tell him the precise distance to her. ** Wilfred tells Clwyd it's all up to her now, then uses his final spell slot to dimension door the two of them to the witch. ** As soon as Team Small appear in the lava tube, Clwyd unleashes a synaptic static on June, but it's not enough to finish her off. ** Panicked, June screams 'leave me alone!' and dispels Wilfred's water breathing before trying to swim away. ** Wilfred, his lungs already full of water from water breathing, immediately begins to drown. Only a lifetime of practice and discipline in the arcane arts allows him to keep concentration on the banishment spell (while Team Tall were still exiting the chamber that the hydra would have reappeared in; Pyt dropping his hulking crab form to do so). ** In his final congnisant moments, Wilfred managed the word 'CAP!' through his telepathic bond to Clwyd. ** Clwyd takes off her Cap of Water Breathing and shoves it into Wilfred's hands, then makes after the fleeing witch. ** The goblin raises her blasting rod and fires a final two shots of her eldritch blast, running through June the Maiden with both, crashing into the corals beyond. The water clouds with witch blood and June's body falls limp, dead. ** Wilfred gets the cap on his head and somehow screams out the command word Clwyd told him through the telepathic bond, 'MAELSTROM!' surrounding his head with an air bubble as the magic item activates. Then he's hacking up lungfuls of seawater and eventually breathing in sweet, sweet air. * Through the telepathic bond, Team Small informed the others that June was dead and they had her corpse. Since they were short on time, the party knew they didn't really have time to wait or meet back up. They'd have to head to the surface in the two groups they were now in. ** Team Small opt to rest, so that Clwyd at least would have some spell slots to protect the two of them on the way out. ** Team Tall briefly encountered a giant electric eel that was out hunting, but Cormorant scared it off. ** Other than that, there weren't any real complications. ** When Team Tall again encountered the mud mephiti, none of them could understand what this little elementals were saying. Pyt just chucked 20gp at them and the group swam past. ** Team Tall caught up to Team Small - who were slowed down hauling June's corpse - somewhere in the coral-free lava tubes. ** Together, the five of them rushed for the surface, making it back to the island they'd left Jolene and the tied-up quickling named Teal. ** They had a brief, sass-filled conversation with Jolene while Aerendyl deposited the barely-living, trussed-up quickling and June's corpse into the reflection of the moon that was waiting on the water's surface by the shore. That reflection again faded soon after. * The party decided to spend the night in Pyt's hut on the island rather than push their luck trying to head elsewhere. The hut was not a drum this time, but a featureless dome of a colour that blended in with the glassy rocks of the isle. Inside, Pyt had added a few more cave paintings of his victories, some of which confused his half-elf and his hulking crab form. * The group awakes at 10-ish on the morning of the fourth day of the full moon. Not all of them were fully recovered (hit dice), but they decided they should attack again immediately rather than waste any more time. ** Very briefly, they head to Freetown so that Cormorant can buy more supplies to fill his healer's kit. ** While Cormorant and Wilfred are out on that errand, the Jack of Bones visits the other three who remain on the Drunken Dragon in Freetown's leeward docks.The Jack is mostly just checking in, ready to speak cryptically and be annoying. Pyt asks him if he's told Mary what they're doing and doesn't quite follow the Jack's answer. The Jack for his own part says that he feels like he's caught somewhere in the middle of a joke for which he's not going to witness the punchline. When he's done talking, he skips away. ** When Cormorant and Wilfred return, the five of them have a team meeting. They ask the old pirate what he knows about Mackerel from his time on her island. *** Cormorant tells the group that Mackerel had a simple dwelling on a small-ish island. He worked the fields there sometimes, did a lot of manual labour, cooked and cleaned for her, washed her sometimes (to his shame, he said), and so fourth. Mostly, he says, she's an old woman on a remote island and does things you'd expect to that end - walks around the island and such. *** They ask about the Weird goat and Cormorant says he remembers a normal goat that Mackerel doted on. If it were a normal goat, it should be long dead by now though. *** At this point, the party briefly discuss the idea of Pyt transforming into a goat himself and trying to seduce the Weird Goat to draw it away. *** Cormorant also mentions that Mackerel has precognitive powers, though apparently they're sporadic, not working as well the further forward she looks. * That night, the party head to the Moonlit Isles again, ready to use the portal in the Night Mother's lair, since they're not much of a rowing crew. ** On the way over the central Moonlit Isle, the party walk past a pair of phantoms, two of Cormorant's old captains - Twice-Hanged Artemis and Greenbeard - both looking tied-up and dead on thrones. ** They walk up the hall of memories in the Night Mother's house, with each step giving them an older memory. Wilfred hears the final words his mother said to him: 'Promise me you'll hold onto this, my beautiful boy. Hold onto it, then, no matter what happens next, we'll be together. Promise me.' Out loud, he says 'I promise.' * They go through the portal at the end of the hall of memories, emerging on the same mountain path that Clwyd saw when she stumbled through the first time. The full moon lit up the ocean, the distant Sand Steps, and the spires of rock that made up the border of Sawtooth Basin. ** Pyt sent Jolene, told to stay in the form of a crow and not speak until spoken to, upwards to have a look around. She saw the gravelly mountain paths that wound upwards, but before she got to the top she was mauled by a pissed-off pegasus. Pyt summoned her back to his side before she was 'killed,' but not before she took a major kicking. ** After that the group go downwards, eventually finding the shoreline. They skirt around it for about 15 minutes, but eventually it becomes clear that somehow this ain't the version of Mackerel's island that Cormorant knows. It appears to only be this mountain spire jutting out the ocean. ** The literature they found in the Night Mother's lair said the portal led to Mackerel's lair though. Pyt suggests that this might be some more witch shit. ** The group decide that upwards is pretty much the only way to go. * The party start hiking up the mountain. It's fairly tough going, with them having to physically climb in sections, with gravel sliding out underneath them, and with a sheer drop waiting for them if they slip more than a few feet. ** After 30 minutes of hiking and climbing, Cormorant and Clwyd take another step forwards on the gravel path and feel a piercing pain in their feet as if they'd stood on caltrops. However, the path looks completely innocuous. Wilfred casts detect magic and feels the horrible, oppressive presence of Weird Magic on the path ahead, extending beyond the range of the spells detection. ** The group starts moving along the Weird gravel path with more trepidation, with Cormorant and Clwyd limping slightly from the damage they'd incurred. ** Some ways along this path, most of the party start heading a pair of voices from a cave opening in the mountainside above them. The duo are raving, refer to each other as 'dear' and 'darling' respectively, appear to be male and female, and are talking about what they should hunt and eat this night. One wishes to go after the pegasus again, but the other fears they can't catch it. Then the first suggests manticore. The other rebukes by saying they could eat harpy. But the first objects that they had harpy last week! ** The party go to sneak away, but Wilfred makes a squeak as he stands on a sharp stone and the two voices in the cave shush each other. The party freeze. * The party stand on the Weird mountain path with bated breath, the raving voices now fallen silent. ** Cormorant tries to spot anything, suspecting some invisibility shit, but he doesn't catch sight of much. ** Then a red-skinned face sporting a pair of little horns and huge smile pokes out the cave above to look down at them: it was a large, muscular oni. ** The party start firing at it, but it's mostly hidden by the rocks. ** Then the second one reveals itself, a smaller oni, blue-skinned, and more magical than the red one. It had turned invisible, flown out so it was perpendicular to the party on the mountain path, and then unleashed a cone of cold on them all. ** The battle was fast and fierce after that. *** Aerendyl hurt himself on the Weird path as he tried to flee. *** Pyt cast bestow curse through Jolene on the blue oni, and Wilfred dedicated a lot of his attention on the magic caster too: counterspelling its subsequent attempts and hitting it with a lot of flame arrows and minute meteors. *** Clwyd cast fly on herself, Cormorant, and Pyt. Then she took to the air and started eldritch blasting, pushing one oni or the other around as best she could. *** Cormorant squared off with the big red oni, with the pair of them trading huge blows on each other. The old pirate was able to parry a fair amount of the things big swings but eventually pulled back when its regeneration was evidently slowing the progress he was making. *** Pyt took a few big hits from the red oni, but used a few catapulted rocks to hurt the thing, eventually killing it with a dissonant whispers that sent it crashing into the mountainside and tumbling downwards. *** The blue oni soon followed its mate to death and the bottom of the mountain. * The party opt to look around the oni cave and rest up before pressing on further up the mountain. Cormorant used his healers kit on himself and Pyt before they took a short rest. Wilfred is with them in the cave too. Meanwhile, Clwyd and Aerendyl readied themselves to head down the mountain with the portable hole in pursuit of the oni corpses. Category:Part Four